Archive for the ‘Irish Web2.0 News’ Category

We got an email from Mark Frawley of Irish start-up Parsity. They have created a very nifty site called nametoolkit.com. It takes the simple concept of checking domain name availability and adds intelligent suggestion features. As anyone who has used the GoDaddy suggester knows, this is an area that needs a lot of improvement.

I just used it to try and come up with a domain around “Facebook Killer”. I like their suggestions! I think I’ll be using this site a lot in the coming months.

Kernel Capital has just announced that they have invested â‚¬500k in Waterford-based FeedHenry, a spin-out from the TSSG group in Waterford Institute of Technology.

FeedHenry enables you to build cross-platform mobile applications using just HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. Two of their really cool features are:

the fact that you don’t need N SDKs to build for N platforms because they do the build for you in the cloud

and they have a powerful server-side JavaScript component to reduce the load on the client and to enable you to access things like SQL DBs, enterprise web services etc

If you are building a web-app and you don’t have a strong story in at least Android and iPhone, stop now and figure it out before you proceed any further. In fact, maybe you should be building for mobile first?

Web developers who know their way around JS should have a look at FeedHenry. Your existing skill-set is all you need to build an app. They have a free Developer tier and you can build for up to 8 mobile platforms.

Digital Mines, a new Irish Cloud Computing provider, has just announced a funding round of â‚¬750,000. This includes Delta Partners first investment from their Bank of Ireland start-up and Emerging Sectors equity fund. Enterprise Ireland and existing investors were also part of the round.

The company is run by Ed Byrne is who well known to everyone in the web space in Ireland. Ed was General Manager of Hosting 365, which was sold last year to SunGard AS.

The whole idea behind Digital Mines is to take the power and usefulness of cloud services such as Amazon AWS and make them accessible to business users. Currently most cloud offerings required far too much technical knowledge. Digital Mines takes all of that and turns it into a set of one-click operations.

The Delta investment is not just important for Digital Mines, it is also sends a strong message that the Seed Funds in Ireland are out there investing in new and exciting companies despite all the doom and gloom. You can expect to see many more announcements from Shay and the team in Delta in the coming months.

The event will bring together people with different skillsets to build prototype web/mobile applications which could form the basis of a commercial opportunity; more specifically, the event will bring together software developers, graphics design folks and business strategists. During the event, the participants divide into teams, each of which builds a basic prototype of their concept and develops ideas on how it could form the basis of a startup.

Startup Weekends take place all over the world and are generally considered to be a place to learn about the startup world, get to know folks who are interested in doing something in the space, bounce around some ideas and, importantly, try to turn some of them into reality. Some of the teams formed during startup weekends have gone on to much bigger and better things, e.g. Foodspotting and memolane.

The event has been held once before in Dublin – May 2010 – and was a fantastic success: of the 6 teams that were formed throughout the weekend, 4 of them subsequently went on to enter the NDRC Launchpad incubator to bring their ideas from some basic concept prototype developed over the course of the weekend to a working system with a potential commercial case. (More info here).

The response to the weekend so far has been great – ticket sales have been strong and we’re expecting the event to sell out. Tickets for non-technical folk – people who have neither developer nor graphics skills – have sold out already and the amount of technical folk in attendance is increasing steadily.

We’re reaching out to developers and/or graphics design folks who are interested in the startup scene – it promises to be a great weekend, with some great people, great ideas and great energy and who knows, it might be the place where some great Irish startups are born!

Tickets are on sale here. There is a modest cost for participation which mainly covers the catering during the event. Further information can be found here.

Belfast-based tech start-up Shhmooze, founded just in April 2010, has been selected as one of the 20 finalists at the Mobile Premier Awards for the Mobile World Congress.

Shhmooze is a free location-based app that lets you use your smartphone to check into a conference or business event and broadcast your presence to other attendees. It is currently available on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad and is coming soon to Android (hurry!) and Blackberry.